Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Our policy is to have free public transport and better public transport. That is incompatible with private sector investment because private sector investment is about profit. The Government has not put more money into Dublin Bus. In 2008, €85 million in subvention went to Dublin Bus and we had 1,200 buses. Today, there is €41 million going to Dublin Bus and we have 1,115 buses. There is less subvention, fewer buses, more people needing and using those buses, higher fares and poorer performance. Then the Government makes a bad situation worse by privatising it. Since Go-Ahead has come in, it has admitted that its poor performance was related to higher than expected driver resignations. I wonder why that is. Might it have anything to do with the poor conditions and pay of those bus drivers? There have been 4,000 complaints in respect of just 10% of the routes since the beginning of this year against Go-Ahead bus services. By the way, the company also had a very poor performance in the context of service provision in Britain, where the privatisation of public transport has been a disaster. How can we get more people into public transport if it is privatised, for profit, if fares are too high and if performance is as a bad as we are seeing from Go-Ahead?

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